The Thompson Palm Springs is one of the desert's most stylish recent additions, and Bar Issi is its dining room — a 180-seat coastal Italian operation that brings the energy of the Amalfi Coast to North Palm Canyon Drive with a conviction that lesser hotel restaurants entirely lack. This is not a hotel restaurant that happens to serve pasta. It is a serious Italian kitchen that happens to be inside a hotel, which is a distinction that matters enormously to the quality of what arrives at the table.
The menu draws from seasonal California ingredients interpreted through Italian technique and coastal tradition. House-made pastas are the centrepiece: radiatori in lamb bolognese, the kind of robust, long-cooked sauce that requires patience and skill, plated with a generosity that would embarrass a Neapolitan grandmother only because it is quite this good. Wood-fired pizzas arrive charred and yielding, made with the same dough integrity that separates the authentic from the approximation. The raw bar — oysters, crudi, shellfish — provides a lighter register that the coastal concept demands and delivers with precision.
Cocktails are a commitment here. The hibiscus cosmo in a coupe glass is the signature, and it is served with the visual theatre of a hotel bar that understands its audience. The wine list is Italian-forward with California woven throughout — enough depth to reward exploration, enough accessibility to not require a sommelier's assistance unless you want one.
The 180-seat space has the scale to absorb a full Saturday night without losing intimacy at the individual table — a difficult architectural trick that Bar Issi manages with confident interior design and thoughtful acoustic treatment. Weekend brunch extends the offering into the daylight hours, and the Saturday energy is a specific kind of Palm Springs pleasure: sun-touched, Italian-accented, and entirely difficult to leave.